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Article: Lessons from earthquakes: there isn't always someone to blameWhen the earth goes from under our feet, we'd rather feel guilty than helpless
- Article from:
- The Independent (London, England)
- Article date:
- January 22, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 1996 The Independent - London. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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"Lisbon which is no more, was it really more vicious Than
London or than Paris, plunged in all that's delicious?
Yet Lisbon is in ruins, while in Paris they dance . . ."
THIS IS part of Voltaire's "Poem on the Lisbon Disaster". He
wrote it after the earthquake of 1 November 1755, which destroyed
most of the city and killed - by collapse, fire or tidal wave -
something like 15,000 people. With this poem, he managed to smash a
hole right through 18th-century assumptions about a benevolent God
and sinful mortals.
Nobody, I think, will write poems about the Kobe earthquake last
week. It could be said to challenge plenty of late-20th-century
assumptions, some of them about the benevolent free ...